The case against the Shuffle

I was at Nokia in Helsinki on Tuesday running a workshop on the Long Tail. I was impressed by how much brainpower they had in house, and how much they were inviting in. Just in the past week I'd been preceded by Henry Jenkins, Cory Doctorow, Esther Dyson, CK Prahalad and probably a few others that I'm forgetting about.

One of the interesting questions that came up during the workshop was about Apple's new iPod Shuffle. In provacateur mode, I described it as a "value subtract" product, arguing that the lack of a display would limit its success.  I got a fierce reaction from one of the Nokia's researchers, who thinks it will be a huge hit because of its passive entertainment value: with near-zero effort on your part, the Shuffle offers a fresh selection of music from your collection, both randomly copied from your hard drive and played in random order. As Apple's marketing puts it: "iPod Shuffle adds musical spontaneity to your life. Lose control. Love it."

This was a good opportunity to put Long Tail theory to the test--what would the rules I've set out predict about the Shuffle's commercial future? The answer: they argue against it. Here's why.

You can think of the thousands of songs on your hard drive as a Long Tail of sorts. Even though you've bought, ripped, or downloaded them all, they're not all your personal "hits". Some of those tracks are songs you don't care for on albums you otherwise like; others are albums you wish you hadn't bought or ripped in the first place. And yet others are songs that you've simply grown tired of.  In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio in your own collection can be nearly as variable as that in any commercial music service.

The difference is that the commercial services provide recommendations, editors' picks, bestseller lists and collaborative filtering to suppress most of the junk. This is important: a key element in extracting value from any Long Tail is the ability to find the diamonds in the rough, which gets harder the further into the rough you go.  In other words, a Long Tail without good filters is just noise.

So that, in a nutshell, is the case against the Shuffle.  For anyone with a big music collection (thousands of tracks) a random walk through their entire library is statistically likely to be an unwelcome reaquaintance with mistaken purchases, whim rips, filler album tracks and embarrassing ghosts of music taste past.  And if you're anything like me, that gets annoying real fast.

Now, I know that the shuffle feature can be turned off and you can load the device with any playlist you want.  But then it's just another mini music player, save the quite useful feature of telling you which track is playing and allowing you to choose another without having to memorize their order. That's what I meant by "value subtract." No doubt they'll still sell millions, such is Apple's brand and momentum. But I don't think the Shuffle will have anything like the impact of the original iPod itself.

Comments

[David]

Chris, I thought you were in India on Tuesday, and heading to Bangalore. Are you doing a study on jet-lag?

[Mark Wubben]

Question is: do people with thousands of songs want an iPod shuffle or a 20/40/60 gB iPod?

[Chris Anderson]

Actually, I'm in Davos now, but I'm somewhat backlogged with my posts. I've still got a few more India essays to come. And then whatever strikes me here at the World Economic Forum.

[nathan]

Slightly off topic, but here's an example of how iTunes tries to sell ONLY tail while locking out popular items.

I bought Jimmy Eat World's "Last Christmas" as a single off the O.C. holiday soundtrack from iTunes in December. Now iTunes only allows a few songs from that compilation album to be sold as stand alone downloads. To get certain songs you have to buy the entire album.

Why the change? Did some agreement expire? Were certain downloads cannibalizing sales?

In the end, who cares why. All I see as a consumer is that the "spaghetti code" of legal issues and market segmentation that drives the music industry means lost sales and unhappy customers.

[Stephen]

Chris, I didn't realize you were conducting "Long Tail workshops." Any chance we could persuade you to come to North Carolina to do a workshop with us at Lulu.com? We could bring in the Red Hat folks, too, if you were interested.

[Kirsten]

Millions of people listen to the radio, despite the fact that radio stations occasionally (or frequently) play songs that an individual does not like. Listening to a large selection of your music collection on shuffle is like having a radio station preloaded with music you probably already like - but if a song comes up that you don't like, you can actually *skip* it. And you can even fine-tune your radio station's playlist when you get the opportunity. For this reason, I don't see the Shuffle as having less impact than the iPod - the principles are generally the same, it's just somewhat less powerful.

[Bob Mason]

One could make the claim that iTunes acts as a value-added editor because it can autofill the Shuffle with songs with a higher rating. Thus the normal iPod is perfect for those who want to carry the entire The Long Tail with them, but the Shuffle is a useful and complementary device.

[Amit]

I just got mine yesterday!!

I agree that there are a lot of songs in my collection that I do not care about and I'd rather not hear them again. However, the iTunes/iPod combo can (will?) improve over time to learn what you liked vs. what you skipped over, and favor the tracks you like. They thus build personalised filters without users needing to program them explicitly (less work) and also create a user lock-in.

There are also two other elements of "addition by subtraction" - (a) I just can't get over how light it is (it feels lighter than the pack of chewing gum), and (b) they were able to bring the price point down to $150 for 1GB. Not bad!!

[Rex Hammock]

Chris, Begging to differ, the "tail" here is iTunes on ones desktop, not iPod Shuffle. The iPod Shuffle (and I've used one for a week, so I'm speaking from experience) may, to you, be just another mp3 player. But, in reality, it's another means for me and 10 million others to extend our enjoyment of the individual tunes in the long tail of our iTunes collection. For a lot of the same reasons you suggest the Shuffle will fail, I predicted the demise of the iPod Mini. I wouldn't bet against the iPod Shuffle: remember, iTunes is the special sauce of Apple's long tail strategy.

[Toby]

Musicmobs has an application called Mobster that uses collaborative filtering to show similar artists in your own library. It also allows you to make playlists out of the recommendations. I imagine that this would work good with the Shuffle, as you could say "I want to listen to stuff that sounds like the Pixies", then have Mobster make the playlist for you and sync to the Shuffle. Then it becomes something of a smart radio.

[robert]

As a stand-alone execution, the Shuffle looks like a likely candidate for failure. But, the argument ignores some of the other factors that made the original iPod successful: software and culture. Without the iTunes software, the iPod would have met the same fate as the Pippin and Apple III. Without the cult(ure) of Mac and its emphasis on the value of the exclusivity/membership, the iPod would have been another overpriced Apple accessory.


Acknowledging Rex & Toby's points, I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt and guess that they'll be extending iTunes to support the Shuffle (and others) in new ways. Plug in your Shuffle and Apple could give you the option of loading your player with a sort of Current Long Tail Community Playlist. Your library would need to contain those songs in the playlist, and anything missing from it could be offered/promoted to you in the iTunes interface. Apple can tweak the algorithm that builds the playlist to meet a desired sales/consumer tolerance threshold. I'm not as likely to buy 20 songs to fill gaps in a new and unknown playlist, but one or two from acts I'm unfamiliar with might be welcome. Pushing new content would keep with Apple's ad strategy of relinquishing control. Simply resorting your own forgotten or discarded tracks ignores the value of novelty and the law of diminishing returns. Apple would do well to take a cue from Mobster and the growing social tools. Imagine a service (or user hack) along that would plug into Del.icio.us, find read the music tag and return the newest playlist. The adoption rate would likely be lower than the Long Tail Playlist due to sheer expense, but the idea is that hopefully Apple and their user commuity haven't shown the limits of their creativity yet.

[Peter Lakanen]

Chris, I think your post is bit too much like you've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail. I understand your point, but your idea about the long tail of one's music collection is a bit too meta-meta I think (and law of dimishing returns). I personally just delete music I don't like any more after I burn it to CD.

And Nathan, I agree with you about iTunes not allowing you to purchase any song. That is a trend that will only get worse, not better.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I can't tell if you've used the Shuffle or just read about it, so it might have an experential differential. I wasn't sure about it until I got a unit for review, and once I played with Autofill, I'm of a different mind than you.

Autofill in its very primitive version 1.0 lets you randomly select weighted by ratings that you've given your song. (Let's not explore the fact that you can't synchronize and upload your ratings across multiple computers, share them, import them and export them as XML, etc.)

Once you get a Shuffle, your next natural behavior is to start rating songs. Over a very short time Autofill becomes closer and closer to your actual taste instead of your entire library.

You also disregard the value of chance. My first autofill loaded a variety of fascinating choices including short segments from the audiobook of a Harry Potter title, songs from my wife's music collection I had never heard, and music I love that I'd forgotten about.

The Long Tail can involve your own personal backlist of interest and mood as well as the more global issue. That is, there's a long tail attached to me (memories, for starters) and a long tail attached to everything else, too.

[James]

As several people have pointed out, you can fill based on rating. Personally, I have an ipod mini, and when I first got it, I created a playlist of only unrated songs, listened through it, and rated them. (Which worked well since I already had formed opinions since before I got the mini). Now I've rated all the songs, I have a random playlist of 35 songs I haven't heard in 3 weeks and are rated 3 stars or greater, filtering out the crap, but playing something fresh all the time. If I get some new music, I mix these two playlists together, which works pretty well.

I don't know if the shuffle can rate songs, or if you can only do it in iTunes, but even if the latter, the theory still works. (I don't actually sit in front of my computer at home with iTunes all that much, but people with laptops would use it much more).

Skipping is also a useful source of metadata - if you don't like a song and skip it all the time, the times played count won't increase as much as other songs of the same rating, although you'll need a lot of plays for this data to be statistically sound.

[Joshua Porter]

How come nobody has mentioned the "party shuffle" feature in iTunes? It's a shuffle, of my long tail library, and it consistently produces music that I want to listen to. I don't think it is completely random, however, which would make it different than what you're describing Chris.

That said, is the iPod shuffle completely random? Does it play my Christmas music as much as Pearl Jam? I wonder...I don't have one, so I don't know.

What I do know is that party shuffle is a shuffle that works well.

[Kevin Kelly]

I'll bet against you, Chris, and for the shuffle. In part because the shuffle will continue to evolve: maybe they'll add a way to rate a song while it plays, a rating which will come back to your iTunes.

Listen, the average american listens to 21 hours of radio per week -- and as far as they are concerned its on random shuffle -- no control and they love it. The shuffle is just your personal radio station with your own personal long tail play list. What is not to like?

We just have to decide how many millions sold will be "failure."

[pb]

"Question is: do people with thousands of songs want an iPod shuffle or a 20/40/60 gB iPod?"

That's easy: both!

Cmparing the Shuffle experience to other iPods is a mistake. The Shuffle's more like you're own personal radio station and last I checked, people listened to music radio in large numbers. In fact there's a host of different ways to fill up a Shuffle and I suspect a random selection from an entire library will not be the norm.

[Janne]

As a recent iPod Mini user, I've noticed that I simply *hate* to choose the next song. The bloody machine is hard to dig from under your clothes, and especially during winter time the UI is hard to handle. And since iTunes autoplaylists tend to produce relatively sane and nice lists, the screen is mostly just added convenience when choosing which playlist I want.

I think the Shuffle is a part of the left side of the equation - the mass part. Not everything can be personal.

[pb]

Here's a twist: Shuffle owners will make up the tail and account for the majority of iPod usage.

[Tim Walters]

"[1] Some of those tracks are songs you don't care for on albums you otherwise like; others are albums you wish you hadn't bought or ripped in the first place. And yet others are songs that you've simply grown tired of. [2] In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio in your own collection can be nearly as variable as that in any commercial music service."

Big, unjustified jump between [1] and [2]. Percentages count here. I use my (40GB) iPod almost exclusively in shuffle mode (with no ratings--can't be bothered), and far from getting annoyed by songs I don't like, I'm nervous that I'm going to miss out on new stuff because I never bother to listen to the radio any more. It's a perfect blend of novelty and familiarity. Yes, I occasionally need to skip something, but far less often than I would if I had control over the radio.

If I had a Shuffle, I'd just dock it every night and get the same effect, at least until I went on a long road trip.

[Brian Weaver]

They'll just sell millions, but it won't be a success? If you sold millions of anything you would be a success by any measure.

[TW. Andrews]

It sounds as if it just needs a mechanism to choose "popular" songs from the hard drive, rather than just randomly select them. I guess this would require some capacity to measure how popular song on the hard drive are (maybe just a count of the number of times they've been played or copied), but it's not sooo complicated.

[Veken]

I have smartplaylists for my most often played songs and for songs with a rating of 3,4, or 5. that keeps the shuffle playing only songs i like.

[hln]

I can't wait to get mine - it's perfect.

1) It weighs next to nothing.
2) I'm going to use it solely for exercise (see pt. 1), primarily cycling. It holds a whole lot more than my crappy little Lyra (I'm buying a 1 gig one) but is still inexpensive enough that if I spill and break it, oh well.
3) Random rocks.

The iPod hasn't been able to capture me until this product. Now I'll probably be so enraptured I save up and go and buy the full banana for other uses.

Oh, and for $150 I get all this AND can interface with iTunes? Sold. iTunes as the interface is the biggest draw. This'll be my 3rd mp3 player.

hln

[Jay Reding]

It sounds as if it just needs a mechanism to choose "popular" songs from the hard drive, rather than just randomly select them. I guess this would require some capacity to measure how popular song on the hard drive are (maybe just a count of the number of times they've been played or copied), but it's not sooo complicated.

It's such a good idea that you can do it right now.

You can set a Smart Playlist of songs that you've either rated highly or played frequently and set the Shuffle to fill from that playlist. It's quite simple to do really.